Friday, 12 June 2009

The photo above is I think the nicest photo I've taken of Erica Germain, taken at the recent World Champs trials. I hope she likes it :-)

I'd posted a couple of articles with portrait images of our men and I thought that I must write something about the women portraits that I've taken. So I scanned through the 19,000 or so of Taekwon-Do images in my database selecting female portraits and only came up with 344. Now I'm cross eyed as it took a couple of hours to do. And 344 is only 1.8% of the photos I've taken and kept. That's poor form. I'd easily have over 1,000 portraits of the guys!

It got me thinking that there must be something scary about me photographing our women folk. I wondered why and thought I'd better figure it out. Everyone is pretty used to me now and when I point the camera near the guys they don't give a hoot - they just keep on doing what they're doing. The other night we were looking through the trials photos with a few mates and Mark Trotter commented about a close up image I took of him and Luke talking. He said "Doug I didn't even know you were there, we just don't notice you any more". That's how I like it and how to get the best pictures for you. So, either I'm scared of them or they're terrified of me getting a "not good" photo of them. Relax ladies, if I get a bad shot I'll always ditch it later and look out for the best ones.

But point the camera towards a female and they often run for the hills. If it is Alex Couling then she always pulls a silly face - so does sister Sam - but usually an amazing big smile. The mothers all turn away or threaten me with certain death. Or cover their face with their hands. And the one nice photo I publish of a mother is brought up in conversation with me many months later about how bad they thought it was!

But all of you ladies are beautiful - and I love capturing that beauty and all of that character in photographs that you can be proud of. Enough greazing... that might be asking too much because I've yet to meet a "normal" woman who likes any photos of her :-)

So look out... I'm going to try to get more "nice" photos of you... ones that I hope you can feel proud of.

Here are a few favourites, in square format:

And here are a few more in normal landscape format:

I'm thinking of publishing the whole 344 images for all to see. Most have been published before but spread over the last 4 years. What do you think about that? Leave me a comment or abuse or whatever by clicking on comments below...